Summer and Fall 2007
July 31–August 4
Higgsless Electroweak Symmetry Breaking in the Large Hadron Collider–Era
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Elizabeth H. Simmons RI ’01 (Physics, Michigan State University)
One of the most significant problems in elementary particle physics is the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking. Experiments have determined the masses of the elementary fermions (the quarks and leptons) and the masses of the W and Z bosons that transmit the weak nuclear force. However, the dynamic that produces these masses and separates the weak interactions from electromagnetism—thereby breaking the electroweak gauge symmetry—has not been identified.
At present, there is a working theory—the Standard Model of particle physics—that describes the elementary particles and forces but does not explain the dynamics responsible for the generation of mass. Due to the limitations of the Standard Model, theorists are looking beyond it for a deeper understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking and are creating new models whose experimental consequences can be tested at the Fermilab’s (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) Tevatron Collider in Chicago and the Large Hadron Collider now under construction at CERN in Geneva.
This exploratory summer seminar will bring together a group of twelve theorists with expertise in two strands of inquiry that have shown promise for revealing the origin of mass. These theories include new strong dynamics at experimentally accessible energies and the presence of extra space-time dimensions. The seminar participants are aware of and influenced by one another’s published work, but many have not collaborated with one another recently (or ever). Bringing them together for intensive and focused discussions on new models and their experimental implications will create a collaborative effort of greatly increased scope and impact.
July 31–August 4
China and the Making of European Modernity, 1600–1800: New Lines of Research in History, Economics, Literature, and Art
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities and Social Science
Eun Kyung Min RI ’05 (English, Seoul National University)
Robert Markley (English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
In the last decade, there has been an impressive outburst of scholarship on the interactions that took place between China and Europe in the early modern period. The new lines of inquiry taken up in these studies mark a paradigm shift away from the Eurocentric definitions of modernity that locate the beginnings of agriculture, finance, industry, manufacturing, modern commerce, science, state legislation, technology, and warfare in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. In recent scholarship, China emerges as the economic engine and the most powerful player on the global stage in the early modern era.
This seminar seeks not so much to assign modernity to its rightful owner as to reconceptualize modernity in all its representations—cultural, geographical, political, scientific, and social—as a profoundly relational construct and to remap our understanding of the globalized early modern world.
September 28–29
Women's Interfaith Initiatives after 9/11
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities
Diana Eck (Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Harvard University)
Since 9/11, the interfaith movement in the United States has grown exponentially, and women’s leadership has played a critical role. Interfaith organizations and initiatives are often decentralized, removing structural barriers to women’s leadership that exist within many religious institutions. The result is both new forms of women’s religious leadership and new venues for women’s participation in American religious life. Notably, the grassroots, woman-led interfaith initiatives that have emerged over the last six years offer a critical alternative to the traditional model for interfaith engagement.
This seminar will attempt to explore the import and impact of these initiatives on American religious life—specifically on the interfaith movement and the women’s movement. An interdisciplinary team of scholars will be joined by the founders of various women’s interfaith initiatives, as well as by faith-based and interfaith practitioners and activists. Their task will be to identify the emerging methodologies and new models at play and to begin to document the changing shape of American women’s religious leadership.
October 19
The War on Drugs: How to Understand It, How to Move Beyond Its Failures
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science
Alma Guillermoprieto RI ’07
Juanita Leon (2006–2007 fellow, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism)
This exploratory seminar will bring together Harvard faculty with outstanding Latin American experts and policymakers to explore the devastating consequences of the current drug policy for both US and Latin American societies. The seminar will also consider alternative drug policies. We envision that this seminar will generate both enthusiasm and a conceptual framework for a large conference on drug policy to be held in 2008.
November 9–10
Stochastics and Dependence in Finance, Risk Management, and Insurance
Exploratory Seminar; Science and Social Science
Yoonjung Lee (Statistics, Harvard University)
Rustam Ibragimov (Economics, Harvard University)
Xiao-Li Meng (Statistics, Harvard University)
The analysis of modern financial and economic time series presents a number of significant challenges due to the complexity of the models and data faced by researchers. Many standard statistical and econometric methods turn out to be unreliable in the presence of distributional and dependence properties exhibited by the data in real financial markets.
The core idea of the seminar is to focus on the development of robust approaches to modeling and inference for complex data sets in finance, risk management, and insurance. Discussions in the seminar will center on modeling dependence over time and across space, the analysis of dependence and distributional properties in financial and economic time series, and the study of these factors in economics, finance, and risk management. This area of research is interdisciplinary. The seminar will bring together leading experts and rising scholars in multidisciplinary fields: economics, finance, probability, and statistics. One of the seminar’s main goals is to push the boundaries of recent advances in economics, econometrics, and statistics to gain better understanding of financial markets.
November 9–10
Next-Generation Statistical Models and Inference for Speech and Audio Signal Processing
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Patrick J. Wolfe (Electrical Engineering, Harvard University)
The goal of this multidisciplinary exploratory seminar is to bring together computer scientists, engineers, and statisticians to advance the theory and practice of probabilistic modeling of information-carrying natural sound signals.
Despite decades of intensive research in a variety of disciplines, a fundamental mathematical characterization of the class of natural sound signals—speech in particular—remains elusive. The scientific community still lacks a rigorous mathematical foundation to describe the physiological continuum of speech sounds, and a corresponding framework to characterize the signal pathway from production to perception.
A description of speech sounds based on statistical modeling will enable a coherent treatment of a variety of phenomena, from signal processing to speech communication to auditory neuroscience. Both applied numerical harmonic analysis and the statistical tools of functional data analysis provide a means of addressing this challenge; in turn, advances in audio signal modeling stand to impact both scientific understanding and engineering applications, including those in speech and hearing science as well as those in signal processing and communications.
December 7–8
A New Literary History of America
Advanced Seminar; Humanities
Werner Sollors (English and African and African American Studies, Harvard University)
Lindsay Waters (Editor for the Humanities, Harvard University Press)
Greil Marcus (Critic and Author)
This advanced seminar will continue a conversation about American literature and culture initiated at a seminar in January 2006. This seminar, which will include ten invitees (members of an editorial board) and the proposers (the editors in chief and the publisher), has the ambition to help reimagine American literature and culture as an open field—and the participants in the seminar will serve as a search party investigating the field. The long-range goal is the production of a new literary history for which the invitees might serve as editors. Thanks to the seminar and the work of all involved, the group now anticipates completion of the “New Literary History of America” in September 2008 and its publication by September 2009.
January 11–12
On History and Deep Time
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Science, and Science
Daniel L. Smail (History, Harvard University)
Andrew Shryock (Anthropology, University of Michigan)
This exploratory seminar is designed to bring together scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and human sciences for the purpose of having a conversation about time.
At the center of the discussion will be the gap that currently exists between the short chronology of the humanities/social sciences and the deep time of the natural sciences that are concerned with humanity’s deep history. As an intellectual matter, this gap is the product of the fact that the discipline of human history has yet to come to terms with the time revolution of the 1860s, when time came to be understood as stretching far beyond the 6,000 years posited by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Taking their cue from history, other branches of the humanities and social sciences also operate within the span of time afforded by the short chronology. In the wake of the paleoanthropological and genetic revolution that has taken place over the past two decades, it has become ever more important for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to learn to think with deep time. At the same time, the fields that comprise paleoanthropology and human population genetics have only just begun to explore narrative devices for linking the deep past to the recent past.
This exploratory seminar is part of a long-term effort to bring about reunion of scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and human sciences.
Spring 2008
February 8–9
Vision and Its Instruments, ca. 1350–1750: The Art of Seeing and Seeing as an Art
Advanced Seminar; Humanities
Alina A. Payne (History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University)
In recent years, the topic of vision and visuality has attracted a great deal of interest among historians of art as well as the sciences. Perspective has been the most frequently addressed theme both for being a paradigmatic invention of the Renaissance and the most obvious convergence point between artists, architects, and mathematicians. More recently, due to the intense scrutiny paid to images, the interest in the exchanges between the arts and sciences has shifted to the processes of image making and reception and to the physiology of the body and the mechanics of instruments. Most work has tended to focus on the post-Scientific Revolution period. However, the economy of the eye has not had a linear development that climaxed in the modern world. Furthermore, early modern debates on the nature of sight and of seeing—on sight as vehicle as well as limit to knowledge—and on the eye itself as ultimate instrument of nature (often challenged and hence unstable in its privileged position as primary access to truth) have been both complex and complicated.
The seminar seeks to recover this discourse about sight and investigate moments of discovery and crisis and moments of insight and mutual illumination that the arts and the sciences shared in their perpetual effort to understand nature through the eye. In this context, the tools that extended or modified sight, enhanced and transformed it and that turned sight into an event are particularly relevant to the questions that will be addressed. It is the ambition of this seminar to explore the full range of early modern conceptions of vision in which mal'occhio, spiritual visions, and phantasms as well as the artist’s brush or the architect’s compass were seen to provide equal knowledge to, or better knowledge about, newly developed scientific instruments and practices.
March 28–29
From Promise to Reality: Appropriate Contexts for the Use of Mycorrhizal Fungi as Organic Fertilizers
Advanced Seminar; Science
Anne Pringle (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University)
The mycorrhizal fungi are a diverse group of species that grow in association with plant roots. Because they provide crucial elements to plants (phosphorus and nitrogen), these fungi hold great promise as organic fertilizers. Basic and applied research on the symbioses has exploded in the last decade. (According to the Web of Science, 8,799 papers using mycorrhizal were published in 2006.) However, applications of this knowledge to human endeavors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem restoration) have met with only sporadic success. Similarly, efforts to use this work to advance the basic sciences of ecology and evolution remain in their earliest stages.
During the past two years, a group of scientists has been making a concerted effort to synthesize the data and move the field from a descriptive to a predictive science. Two publications are finished, and five more are in progress.
April 11–13
Beyond Creative Incorporation: Cultural Innovation in the Ethiopian Diaspora
Advanced Seminar; Humanities, Social Science, and Arts
Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Music and African and African American Studies, Harvard University)
Steven B. Kaplan (Comparative Religion and African Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
During the turbulent Ethiopian revolution from 1974 to 1991 and in the ensuing post-revolutionary period, hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were forced to emigrate. They established large communities abroad and put down roots in widely scattered locales. This seminar will explore processes of cultural continuity and innovation in Ethiopian diaspora communities in the United States, Israel, and Europe, with particular attention to comparing developments in the domains of art, literature, music, and religion.
Participants will be asked to produce essays on diaspora expressive culture in their areas of expertise in advance of the seminar and will receive detailed commentary and critical feedback from other participants and respondents. A volume of essays incorporating these scholarly appraisals of Ethiopian diasporic cultural creativity, interwoven with narratives from Ethiopian practitioners in these domains, will be the seminar’s outcome.
April 25–26
Discrimination at Work
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science and Law
Frank Dobbin RI ’07 (Sociology, Harvard University)
Scholars of law and organizations have studied corporate response to equal opportunity law since the early 1960s, charting how employers, interacting with the courts and regulatory agencies, devise measures to increase opportunity. Meanwhile, scholars of stratification and inequality have studied how certain corporate practices hinder opportunity for women and members of minority groups, and how others can help foster opportunity. Despite the fact that they study two aspects of the same process—the selection and efficacy of equal opportunity measures—these two groups have rarely interacted. Students of stratification and inequality have much to learn about how organizations arrive at particular strategies for improving opportunity. Students of corporate compliance measures have much to learn about which strategies have proven effective at opening opportunity and why.
One goal of the conference is to bring these two groups into closer dialogue. Another goal would be to inform both corporate strategy and judicial policy about the origins and efficacy of current programs designed to increase opportunity in the workplace. This dialogue might contribute to the identification and selection of superior strategies for improving opportunity, both at the level of the firm and at the level of public policy.
May 2–3
IP without IP
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Science, and Science
Mario Biagioli (History of Science, Harvard University)
Rochelle Dreyfuss (Law, New York University School of Law)
In the last ten years or so, intellectual property has gone from being a little-known part of the law to becoming a household term. The ubiquity of intellectual property in popular discourse has led to an intriguing (if problematic) transformation of its cultural meaning. Intellectual property remains a technical (and expanding) branch of the law, but it has also become a cultural emblem—a catch-all category standing for an extraordinary range of practices within the new information society. The very concept of knowledge (including notions of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage) have been often recast into IP—a category that is often much more extensive than (and sometimes even incongruous with) the actual domain of intellectual property law.
Taking the cultural reification of the concept of intellectual property as its starting point, “IP without IP” brings together scholars from legal studies, anthropology, economics, history of science, literature, business, and science to analyze the many ways in which intellectual property concerns are in fact often managed not through the tools provided by intellectual property law, but through specific relations between people, professional customs, etc. Through a range of empirical case studies, we want to question the conceptualization of IP as a form of property applicable to (or projectable on) an ever-widening range of products and claims by showing how access to and protection of knowledge and cultural productions can be achieved (and has been achieved) without resorting to the law. We do not present these practices as opposed to legally codified IP, but as elements of a landscape of social practices that include IP law and from which it could draw to reinvent itself in the face of mounting and widespread criticism.
May 9–10
Performing Marks
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities
Elizabeth D. Lyman (English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University)
Claire MacDonald (Founding Editor, Performance Research)
Daniel Albright (English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University)
The purpose of this exploratory seminar is to bring together a small group of scholars and artists from different disciplines and periods who are working on closely related aspects of how marks on a page—punctuation, script or typography, symbols (letters, numbers, musical notes, etc.), diagrams, etc.—influence our performed interpretation of a work (spoken, intoned, danced, played, etc.).
